Ok, there are a few threads out there that alude to this, but I didn't find one that covered gmplayer and how to add a ton of skins to it, so I'm writing this piddly how-to to cover just that.

First of all, Barry K. is amazing in that he put together an operating system that is a handful of megabytes, with a great media player built in. He did an awesome job with gxine.

However, I like to be able to be able to change the look of anything I want on my os at a whim. Gxine has other skin options out there, but I found mplayer easier to throw different looks on.

And mplayer requires very low cpu usage. I use it on the PII laptop and it doesn't miss a beat.

Oh, there is also instruction/readme text on a couple of the mplayer installs on how to add skins. By all means, follow that as needed. I just thought this thread might be helpful as it included links and I could make it inclusive as an mplayer/eye candy how to.

1. Go to any of the threads out there that tell you how to install gmplayer. I like this one but there are a few others out there. In one Big_Bass even discusses and shows some included skin options, so a forum search of mplayer will get you started. Follow the instructions on the thread of your choosing and you'll have mplayer installed.

2. Do a google search of mplayer skins. I found this site as an example.

3. Click on the skin that you want. As the download manager (pupzip) opens up, I've found it easiest to just use the default package opener/handler to open it in this case, rather than saving it.

4. Once it's opened in the package manager, select all, then extract it to /usr/local/share/mplayer/skins/. If you get a message that this file doesn't exist, shall I create it? then you entered in the wrong folder options and should check your work.

5. That's it. You can now right click on the mplayer that you have running and select Skin Browser and it will have a list of your newly downloaded skin(s).

Using this strategy you can have another 10-15 skins in a matter of minutes to play with to add to your eye candy. Enjoy!

I'll include some screenshots, all using PupFlux as the base since it happens to be the Puppy I'm using right now .